Hello, I’m Ellen.
It might seem strange, given the work I do with people, but I don’t really believe that people can be broken.
Bones, yes. And perhaps we might FEEL as though we’re broken, but I believe we’re all the way we are for very valid reasons - with all our quirks and defence mechanisms and the sometimes dysfunctional ways that we cope with the world. The ways we’ve adapted to cope with the circumstances of our lives have worked - you’re here, reading these words (and I’m here, writing them).
The part of us that is wired for survival doesn’t care HOW we survive, just that we do, so sometimes how we’ve learned to survive doesn’t feel all that good. Perhaps we’re ready for a different experience of ourselves and of life.
Good news! It’s possible.
Whatever you’re searching for or want to create or change about yourself or your life we’ll get there gently and with kindness, down paths that might surprise us both - because healing, change and growth are rarely linear things.
If you’re looking for some support (and maybe you are, since you’re here) - perhaps you’d like to book in a free 30 minute Zoom call to get to know one another a bit, and see if I might be the right person to offer that support?
'Who in the world am I?'
Ah, that's the great puzzle!
Alice, from Alice in Wonderland
Who is Ellen?
Like all of us, I am made of so many different stories. Here’s one of them:
Once upon a time…
…there was a girl who didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up. She loved stories and believed in magic, and she had two imaginary friends she went on adventures with down the bottom of the garden.
As she grew, she came to understand that stories aren’t real, and neither is magic, and that made her sad. She became a teenager who couldn’t figure out the point of life. The teenager became a young adult who struggled with never feeling good enough, and relationships with other humans were hard.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.
She found solace dressing in black and dancing in nightclubs full of goths, and she became a corporate worker who found it hilarious to have ‘executive’ on her business card, though she never really felt fulfilled living a life of business trips and boardrooms.
She kept following her curiosity, and found skies full of stars, books full of inspiring stories, and festivals full of people embracing their self expression in creative and silly ways.
She started to see that perhaps it wasn’t true that magic wasn’t real. And perhaps stories are the most important thing we have - perhaps we’re MADE of stories.
She travelled the world, collecting more stories and delighting in finding herself in places where goats wandered freely, dressed in colourful shirts, places where she stepped off busses to find sword fighting in the streets and mead for sale on street corners, places where the landscape was so huge all of her human problems paled into insignificance in comparison to the bigness of the sky.
She continued to grow into an adult who still didn’t know what she wanted to be when she grew up.
So she kept following her curiosity. And she decided that maybe it was okay to not know where she wanted to go or who she wanted to be.
Without realising it, she’d stopped trying to find whatever it was she was looking for (in that “I’ll know it when I find it” kind of way), stopped believing she needed to ‘find her passion’ and instead she’d begun to feel like for her, the journey really was the point after all.
And although she giggled at how much of a cliché that felt like, it also felt really good - how fun that there wasn’t any one thing out there that would define and fulfil her! How freeing and expansive, to get to be someone made up of so many different stories!
So now, as someone who is approaching middle age, she’s still following her curiosity, and helping other people follow theirs - supporting them to feel better and find all kinds of magical things of their own (access to their creativity, more energy, inner peace, a way through a life transition, purpose, connection to intuition, a more regulated nervous system, to just feel better than they do...
Curiosity and learning are her happiest places. Right now she’s learning to sing, which is one of the most confronting things she’s ever done, and she’s writing the draft of her first novel with a writing mentor to keep her on track. At some point, she’s going to get around to learning to play the piano.
And she lived happily ever after.
The End (for now…).
It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head.
Always. All the time.
That story makes you what you are.
We build ourselves out of that story.
-Patrick Rothfuss
Professional Qualifications
Advanced Diploma of Transpersonal Art Therapy with Phoenix Institute/ IKON (2015-2017)
600 hour Sex, Love & Relationship Coaching Certification (with Majors in Women’s Empowerment & Life Transitions) with Layla Martin/ VITA (2017-2018)
3 year Somatic Experiencing Practitioner training with Somatic Experiencing Australia (2018-2022 (three years turning into four thanks to Covid))
End of Life Doula training with Preparing the Way (2020)
Somatic Experiencing Master Class, Making the Invisible, Visible: A Trauma Healing Journey from Hauntings to Wholeness, an exploration of Transgenerational Trauma with Peter Levine and Efu Nyaki (2020)
Introduction to Eco Psychotherapy training with Wild Mind (2021)
I am a current member with Holistic Therapists Australia.
Want more stories?
Here are some stories that share more about who I am
and what it’s like to work with me:
I'm road tripping at the moment - en route from the far north to as far south as I can go without jumping the straight to Tasmania. And as always, travel is one of my biggest teachers.
Here are a few reflections from the road; things I've been musing on while driving for hours and hours and more hours.